Recent years have witnessed the rapid development of wireless networks and mobile devices. General Packet Radio Service (GPRS) and Code Division Multiple Access (CDMA 1X) as 2.5G solutions to wide areas are available in increasingly greater regions. Wireless LAN 802.11 and Bluetooth have also grown quickly for local area wireless networks. At the same time, mobile devices have increasingly gained in processing power, storage capacity, and battery life. These evolutions have made mobile video communication a feasible possibility.
After reviewing existing discrete cosine transform (DCT) based video technologies, such as MPEG1/2/4 and H.261/263, the inventors discovered that they perform relatively well in a bandwidth range greater than about 40 kbps for quarter common intermediate format (QCIF) size. However, a bandwidth range of only 20-40 kbps is the current range that is stably provided in 2.5G wireless networks. Moreover, the conventional MPEG/H.26x codecs are computationally expensive and practically infeasible for real-time coding on mobile devices in particular.
Unfortunately, in very low bandwidth conditions, the video generated by MPEG/H.26x usually looks like a collection of color blocks. Furthermore, the motion in MPEG/H.26x-coded video tends to become discontinuous.
Accordingly, there is a need for schemes and/or techniques that can enable video to be used in low-bandwidth situations and/or with relatively computational weak hardware.